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Charger Congestion a Problem for Electric Cars

Written by: Anton Wahlman02/20/13 - 8:50 AM EST

Tickers in this article:
GM NSANY TSLA

NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- I never thought I would write this article. Could we already have too many electric
cars?

You read that right. By at least one measure, we do.

In some places in America today, there are too
many electric cars competing for too few electric chargers in
public locations, primarily in city and mall parking garages. This is
causing some unhappiness and grief among electric car drivers, and
it's getting worse every day.

Let's start by stepping back for a minute, reviewing the relevant
numbers. By the end of 2012, there were over 70,000 electric cars on
the road in the U.S. In 2013, estimates mostly range between 100,000
and 125,000 electric cars sold, so we would end 2013 with at least
170,000 electric cars on the road, cumulatively. This counts both
pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

Most electric car owners charge their cars in at least one of two
places: home and work. However, sometimes it is either necessary,
desirable or simply possible to charge while you are parked in a
parking garage such as in a city center or at a mall. It just makes
sense.

Except I'm starting to see more congestion at chargers in these
locations. Granted, this is not universal. Some electric car chargers are still used very little.

However, at a rising number of locations, especially in
California, I am noticing an increasingly more typical scenario: A
parking garage has two chargers, each with one 240 volt and one 110
volt outlet. Four electric cars are plugged in, two of whom
are charging more than twice as fast as the other two. In the same
parking garage are many other electric cars, parked
without charging.

In other words, you may have 15 to 20 electric cars in the parking
garage, but only two are able to charge at a speedy rate, and two
others at a turtle-slow rate. A year from now, you could have 30-40
electric cars in that parking garage, waiting and unable to charge.
There is already today an acute need for many
more electric car chargers, as the current ones are utilized nearly
100% of the time.

An even smaller, but more recent, phenomenon are the Tesla(TSLA) "superchargers." These chargers are DC -- as opposed to AC -- and
operate at 440 volt. These charge many times faster than AC at 240
volt. Tesla tends to talk about these chargers giving five miles of
range per minute you are charging, so in 12 minutes of charging you
would get 60 miles.

So far, the Tesla superchargers are located in a few places connecting
San Francisco with Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as well as on the
freeway from Washington, D.C., to Boston.

One obvious problem with the Tesla superchargers is that there are too
few locations spread over too much space. Not too far to make it, but too
far for an ideal safety net given the risk of a detour or delay. There
are also not enough Tesla superchargers at each location.